early adopters - Programming Blog

Posts Tagged ‘early adopters’

7 Mar 2010

poll-image Happy Friday, people! Along with the venerable tradition of Follow Friday, today also marks this week’s edition of the Friday Poll.

Last week we wanted to know if location checkin services freak you out in terms of privacy concerns. Reactions were pretty mixed, although many of you felt like services gave you enough control over permissions and what to make public. Some were concerned about the “digital divide” between early adopters who probably have the experience to know how to use the tools wisely, and the more general public who may end up confronting more privacy issues due to unfamiliarity with these services.

This week there’s another hot topic on the table, thanks to a comment made by Google’s European Director of Online Sales John Herlihy, who said that Google’s focus is squarely on mobile because “in three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.”

We definitely wanted to find out what Mashable readers thought about the future of desktops in light of the push towards mobile: Will desktops still be around? Can these form factors co-exist or will mobile rule the day in short order? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Mashable Answers

Pete Cashmore: Desktops will be a lot less relevant versus laptops and phones. Even for processor-intensive tasks, high-end laptops often suffice.

Ben Parr: No — it will take a lot more time than that. However, you will start seeing app stores replacing traditional purchasing of software in three years.

Josh Catone: “Irrelevant” is a pretty strong word. I don’t know that desktops will ever be irrelevant as long as we continue to use computers. While mainstream users will undoubtedly gravitate toward small, fast, easier-to-use machines like laptops, smart phones, video game consoles, tablets and other connected devices for most of their day-to-day computing, there will likely continue to be a need for desktops in many corporate environments and for resource-intensive tasks (like editing film or rendering computer graphics).

Brenna Ehrlich: No. While it would probably be more cost effective to have one device that caters to your every need, it still remains difficult to both read and write on mobile devices. That all speaks to the permanence of devices such as laptops, but I’m not so sure about desktops.

Matt Silverman: Not completely, but certainly less relevant as we get more processing power into laptops and tablets. If we can do gaming and audio/video production equally as well on a portable computer, then why not?

Christina Warren: No. I think the paradigm will change and that secondary and mobile devices will grow in importance, but no, I don’t see desktops becoming irrelevant in three years.

Tamar Weinberg: Nope. PC gamers will always be reliant on the type of hardware that only desktops offer. Mobile technology will become a lot more prevalent, but as desktops are usually always ahead of the game in terms of feature set and power, desktops will still have a place.

Barb Dybwad: Even mainframes are still around so, no, I don’t think desktops will totally disappear. The rise of netbooks though shows that a lot of people just need “good enough” for a lot of tasks and are willing to trade performance for mobility in lots of use cases. But I agree with Tamar that gamers will still demand the PC hardware experience, and other power-intensive tasks like video-editing and multi-track audio will keep desktops in service for some time even as some users will be doing more of that on laptops and mobile devices too.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ericsphotography

Reviews: Google, Mashable, iStockphoto

Tags: computing, desktops, future, Google, laptops, lunchtime poll, Mobile 2.0, polls, predictions, smartphones

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Boomers Slowly Joining the Mobile Web

In: web resources

4 Mar 2010

New statistics about baby boomers’ usage of the mobile web are here, and the news, sadly, is not surprising. This generation of users (ages 45 and older) has been slow to adopt mobile Internet technology. However, that’s not to say they aren’t getting on board with the mobile web revolution – they’re just taking a little more time to get here than the other demographic groups surveyed.

Today, only 55% of boomers consider their mobile phone a necessity, a number which likely shocks younger generations whose attachment to their handheld device is so strong, they claim to “feel naked without it.”

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Boomers: Slow to Adopt New Technology

The delay with which baby boomers embrace new technologies isn’t limited to the mobile web – this is just the next item in a series of technology trends where boomers seem to lag behind. Outside of the pro-social media analyst group Forrester (whose reports we desperately want to believe), most studies show boomers have been slow to adopt new technology, be it social networks or smartphones.

Although as of summer 2009, older users were joining Facebook in record numbers, even outnumbering high school students on the site, it took a long time for them to get there. This group of technology users is definitely not filled with early adopters. Instead, boomers need to wait and see the benefits of a new technology before signing on, or so says eMarketer, the analyst firm who released this latest mobile web report. On Facebook, that benefit was likely the “network effect” – enough of their friends urged them to join at the same time as their younger family members were busy posting photos and videos of the boomers’ grandchildren, something boomers didn’t want to miss out on.

Stats on Boomers and the Mobile Web

As for the mobile web, although the technology in question is different, the desire (or lack thereof) to participate is the same. Until the boomers see a real need for the mobile web, smartphones and the accompanying mobile apps, they’ll get by just fine without it, thank you very much.

A few key stats from eMarketer’s report:

85% of baby boomers own a mobile phone, but the majority own feature phones (non-smartphones)
55% consider their mobile phone a necessity
Boomers make up only 19.6% of touchscreen phone users
Boomers make up only 21.1% of smartscreen phone users
Younger boomers (ages 45-54) are more likely to own a smartphone or touchscreen phone than older boomers

Things are Changing

As Lisa E. Phillips, eMarketer senior analyst, kindly puts it, “boomers are underrepresented among smartphone users.” The good news is that’s starting to change. Slowly but surely, boomers are becoming more interested in smartphone devices. Phillips notes that their interest is influenced by the prevalence of smartphones in the marketplace combined with a down economy which is forcing boomers to forgo retirement. Because many smartphones have a business aspect to them, boomers are starting to see the appeal of these devices.

However, the most important factor slowing their adoption is price. As carriers reduce prices for both phones and data plans, many more boomers will join their younger counterparts to become mobile web users themselves.

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Location Will Be This Year’s Twitter At SXSW

In: web resources

26 Feb 2010

We’re two weeks away from the SXSW Interactive, a drinking festival with a side of tech that takes place each year in Austin, Texas (before the larger SXSW film and music portions). While the conference itself is interesting, more interesting is usually the “next big thing” that comes out of it. And I think I already know what it will be this year.

Three years ago, Twitter famously was the talk of the conference (it won the web award that year). While sure, it didn’t explode into mainstream popularity until sometime later, the writing was on the wall for the early-adopters who started using it there or shortly thereafter. Two years ago, it was arguably Twitter again that was the must-use service throughout the conference as it continued to mature. But last year saw some new entries rise. Both Foursquare and Gowalla launched at the conference, with Foursquare gaining much of the momentum coming out of the conference (as some of us predicted). And this year, I suspect it will be largely an extension of that, with location services in general being the talk of the show.

Based on what I’ve been hearing, basically at the major players in the location-based space have big things planned for this year’s SXSW. Foursquare hopes to have a new, completely overhauled version of its iPhone app ready for the event this year. They are also likely to have a huge batch of new badges for people to collect throughout the week. Meanwhile, Gowalla has a large event of its own, complete with special VIP access if you use the service throughout the conference. The SXSW conference is also highlighting the Austin-based Gowalla as a key tool on its own pages.

A newer startup, Plancast (started by TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson — think “Foursquare For The Future“), has already put together a helpful unofficial SXSW guide surrounding events during the conference (and actually events for those who aren’t attending too). They also hope to have their iPhone app ready in time for the conference.

Meanwhile, both Twitter’s and SimpleGeo’s plans are still largely unknown at this point, but both are planning big things, we hear. Twitter could use the event to launch its ad platform, and CEO Evan Williams is giving the keynote on Monday.

And then, of course, there is Facebook. While they’re sniffing around Loopt right now, could they use the conference to talk a bit more about their location plans? If all these other services start getting a ton of buzz during the conference, they might have to.

Of course, all of this is assuming that AT&T supplies any service whatsoever this year. Last year, the network was completely overloaded until the final two days after the telecom giant scrambled to up their bandwidth (and even then it was only marginally better). They promised that failure would never happen again (people in San Francisco in New York City may have something to say about that), so we’ll see this year. If AT&T fails again, it could really hurt a lot of these location-based services, many of which are heavily predicated around the iPhone.

Otherwise, this is going to be location’s year at SXSW.

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